NTE: Neverness to Everness PS5 Review. NTE – or Neverness to Everness – is a free-to-play gacha RPG by Hotta Studio, who previously developed Tower of Fantasy. While it follows the pretty typical gacha formula like Genshin Impact or Arknights, the main attraction here is the city setting, which feels like a proper point of differentation from its genre peers.
NTE: Neverness to Everness Review – Small City Gacha
Enjoy The City Vibes
The entirety of NTE: Neverness to Everness takes place inside a dense city and as you might expect, you can even drive cars and motorcycles to aid in your traversal pursuits. As is custom with gacha games you start out with an S-Tier character for your main, then you recruit a full team of 4 characters as part of the early story. You also get a free character as a login reward if you’ve logged in for three days, and you get some tutorial dice throws to roll new characters. Just like you use tickets in other gachas to draw from a character banner, here you toss dice and get random rewards depending on what field you land on.
There is a short two-part prologue after which you can freely access the entire open world and work on side content in any order. The story is arguably the most underdeveloped part of the game. There are only five main quests at present, with the last one only requiring Hunter Level 24 (your overall account level), which you can reach pretty quickly if you blast through the side content. The problem with the launch content is that once you hit the story cap there’s not much reason to keep levelling up further, and the game quickly turns into a repetitive maintenance job of going through the daily tasks.
What To Do
The side content however is more developed and consists of three main components: Side Quests, Commissions (special bosses in open world), and raising your Tycoon Level through ‘Guide Quests’. There are also collectable items in the open world to raise the completion in each of the five city districts.
Practically everything you do gives rewards, which again, seems like the standard mode of operation for gacha titles such as this. Side Quests account for the most content, some are pretty long and last around 40 minutes, others are much shorter. However, the quest design is pretty bland for the most part and usually goes something like, run back and forth from point A to B, talking to the same NPCs over and over again. There are only a few inventive puzzle quests, such as ‘Lights On’ and ‘Flipped Phone Booth’, which I much preferred over the other dialogue heavy quests, but overall, repetition sets in quickly here too.
The city looks nice, regardless of what platform you’re playing on and it’s easily one of the visually more appealing gachas out there. There are lots of shops to explore and you can even buy businesses that make passive income, personal properties to live in, buy sports cars, and participate in street races. The city is quite small, however, as you can drive from one end to the other in 1-2 minutes. The game clearly goes for a more contained and dense urban environment instead of the vast landscapes of your average gacha. While this is part of the attraction, it also makes the game feel very small and there’s just not sufficient content at launch to keep it interesting past a week of playing.
Suboptimal Menu Navigation
One of my biggest pain points is the menu navigation. For example, dailies don’t have their own menu, instead they are tugged away in a submenu of the Exploration menu, which doesn’t even appear in the radial quick select menu. There are just so many submenus nested nonsensically in other menus, I keep forgetting where to find certain things and have to spend minutes browsing all menus again.
Managing your own businesses is one of the cooler mechanics. It works similar to buying properties in GTA V, but instead of just making passive income without touching anything, you’ll want to actively restock ingredients for your café to produce more expensive dishes, and assign well suited characters to manage the shop. Then as your money grows you can expand your business empire further by buying more properties. It is a bit slow to get started and you’ll want to raise your Tycoon Level to unlock more city features, but that’s where the game offers the most hours of content.
Combat
If you prefer to focus on combat, there are a bunch of ‘arenas’ where you can challenge enemies for rewards, but it costs stamina that slowly recharges passively. The Commissions are unique boss hunts around the city that also give good rewards, though they are quite short however and there aren’t sufficiently many of them to keep you busy for more than a few hours.
You level up your characters with items you earn as rewards. Then at certain levels you need special Ascension Materials (or play a short quest) to raise the level cap further. Your characters in NTE can’t be equipped with „weapons“, instead they use something called ‘arcs’ which determine their passive stat boosts, and ‘consoles’ which also give passive boosts. This allows for some freedom with particular stat builds for your characters, but beyond passive stats it doesn’t change the combat considerably.
In combat you can use dodges, skills, ultimates, and basic attacks. The ultimates recharge when you land any other type of damage and can be used frequently every few seconds. You can also string combos together by switching between characters that support each other’s elements. The combat mechanics are pretty simple and easy to get into, but lacks challenge. Even being 20 levels below requirement I had no trouble beating bosses. Eventually you can raise the world level which makes enemies tougher and improves rewards, but only after you’ve spent quite a bit of time on the grind.
Ultimately, at launch NTE just lacks sufficient content to keep it interesting past a few days of playing, especially the abrupt story end. What’s there is decent quality for a free-to-play game, and you’re not forced to spend any real money, as everything is doable through in-game progress. You can’t go wrong with checking it out, but don’t expect a huge RPG or an offering which meaningfully separates itself from the rest of the gacha pack beyond its city setting.
NTE: Neverness to Everness is out now on PS5.
Premium codes kindly supplied by PR.